There’s Room at My Table for You, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. What do you think sanctification really is? Do you think he's getting busy in church and memorizing verses, cleaning up yourself morally and switching your radio to K-Love and not watching really bad movies?

Is that what you think Christian growth is? God did not save you to sanitize you and put you on the shelf. He saved you to send you into service, but we could say that he converted you not to quarantine you. He converted you to commission you. Welcome to Summit Life with pastor, author, and teacher J.D. Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovich.

You know, we can come up with some pretty great excuses when we don't want to do something like, I don't have time, or I don't know what to say, or I simply don't have the skill needed. Today pastor J.D. Greer concludes our short but powerful study in Luke chapter 14 by helping us deal with some of these obstacles. He encourages us to look at how our careers and even our dinner tables are a place where we can actually serve others, frankly without even having to learn anything profound or perfect any new skill.

That's good news, right? So if you missed any of the other messages in this teaching series, you can find them online anytime at jdgreer.com. So let's get started right now with the conclusion of a message we began yesterday titled, There's Room at My Table for You. The gospel today spreads in the world through, not through apostolic effort. Think apostles, somebody like me, somebody who works in the church.

The gospel spreads mentally through ordinary people who just say, God showed me how to use my career for the great commission. I think here of my own father. I think I've told you his story before. My dad, when he retired, the day that he retired, literally that afternoon, his company rehired him for more money to be a consultant on a project that they were doing over in what we call the 1040 window, which is the least evangelized place in the world. They hired him to oversee the construction of a plant, the textile plant over there.

So he goes over for 18 months with my mom and they live there. While he's there, he rubs shoulders with Asian businessmen that we have never been able to get close to on any of our mission trips, doing English corners and giving out water bottles. He's able to lead a couple of those businessmen to Christ. What it shows you is that God has already opened the door for so many of us to be there. I was reading this article in a missions journal that explained that if you count up all the missionaries over in the 1040 window, between the 10th and 40th parallel where most of the unreached peoples live, the total number of missionaries from every evangelical denomination is 40,000.

Now, that's awesome. Praise God. We need 10 times that many. If you add up the number of Americans working in secular employment in the 1040 window, 2 million. Now, if demographic trends hold, which I assume they would, that means what, 36% of them identify as born again? Let's just write off two thirds of them is not really serious about their faith. So let's not even count them.

And let's just take a third of that number. That means that there are 200,000 practicing Christians, practicing Christians who believe the gospel right now in the 1040 window, somebody else paying for it. What if they saw their primary purpose in being there as being there to be disciple making disciples? That would go from 40,000 missionaries to 240,000 without costing the church another dime. I want you to understand God placed in some of your hands a key and that key he intends to unlock the nations.

And you've got to ask the question, how can my job be? I read this, I'm sorry to reference so many articles, but Forbes magazine had an article that said that 75% of college graduates today, 75% believe that their career will take them overseas at some point. Now I'm gonna go ahead and tell you that ain't true. Okay. That's like, I read another stat that said 87.2% of all college graduates in America think they're above average at math. I'm like, some things are kind of self-defeating.

Okay. So that's not true. That's not true, but it shows you that many of you have careers that very well could lead you to do. That's why we say, give us your first two years and let us put you on one of these church plants. That's why we tell retirees, hey, why not give your first two years after retirement to go in and serve it on one of our church planting teams, because this is what God gave it to you for, which leads to question four. Do you see the primary use for the money that you make from your job?

What do you see it as? The money you get from your job is certainly how you take care of and bless your family. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of your labor. God gives us richly all things to enjoy. But one of the reasons God prospered you, you understand this, one of the reasons that he prospered you is for the purpose of blessing others.

For many of you, the whole party you're throwing with the money you make from your job is for you. I mean, sure, you throw some change and some leftovers God's direction, but you're not giving the first and the best to God. You're not using the money God gave you for the purposes God gave it to you for, primarily. God did not enable you to make the money you make just so you could drive the nicest cars or live in the nicest houses or have lives that are filled with the nicest amenities. He gave you, he prospered you so that you could leverage that prosperity for the poor and the needy.

And we will have to answer to God for that, Jesus says, based on this parable. One of my favorite biblical heroes has always been a guy named William Tyndale. First translated of the Bible into English. And I have a couple in my backstage area, I have a copy of a Bible from the 1400s, or it's a page from it that they called the chain Bible, because it was in Latin and they chained it to the pulpit in English speaking pulpit so that nobody could take it home.

It'd be the worst thing in the world for people to get ahold of the Bible they thought. William Tyndale changed that, he translated it into English, he paid for it with his life. He would end up being burned at the stake and it's an incredible story and I was always so inspired by it. I learned not too long ago an aspect of the story that I'd never heard, the story of another guy named William Monmouth, who was a partner with Tyndale that I'd never heard of. He was not in ministry, he wasn't a trained preacher, he was a businessman who William Tyndale led to Christ and Monmouth got this vision, he owned this big fleet of merchant ships. So he used the wealth from his merchant ship trading to fund Tyndale's translation project and printing project and then he used his network of all these ships going all throughout the English empire to carry the gospel to all these different places.

So that when the king of England decided he was going to kill Tyndale and burn all his translations, there were way too many scattered all throughout the world that they could never get them back and in part led to the King James Bible that we have and so I have a copy of one of the Bibles that Tyndale translated and it just reminds me two things. One, how precious the word of God is and number two, it reminds me that God takes different people in his church to prosper the kingdom and some of you, that's why God gave you what he gave you and it's time for you to start asking that question, why did God give me this skill? So that's all question number one. If your life were depicted as a party, who would be the invited guest? I promised you a second question from Jesus's teaching and here it is. This one's much more literal. Number two, are you including outsiders at your dinner table? That literally is what he's saying, right? Let's just take Jesus's teaching at face value around your actual table, your meals, your parties.

Are you including the poor, the lame, the blind, and the crippled? I read a book recently that I want to commend to all of you. It's called The Gospel Comes with a House Key. It is written by a lady who actually lives locally here. She lives in Durham.

Her name is Rosaria Butterfield. She has one of the most incredible stories I've ever heard. She was a professor at Syracuse University of English literature and queer theory. She was a committed lesbian in a committed lesbian relationship and she was what you think about when you think culture warrior on the left side, that's who she was.

In fact, she wrote a seminal article on queer theory that is still referenced today by the homosexual movement as being instrumental in understanding it. So she was very involved in that. Well, a group named Promise Keepers was coming to her part of New York and she just thought it represented the worst possible people, you know, these Christians who believe the Bible. So she wrote this, I mean, just scathing letter to the editor in the local newspaper. And she said, I got so much reaction from that. She said, I got all these letters. And she said, I actually had two piles on my desk for a couple of weeks after that, one called hate, one called love. And some people would write me and they would just, oh, you're awesome.

And thank you for saying all this. And I put it in the love pile. And then people would write me and they would just write me over the coals and tell me I was a disgusting human being.

I put that in the hate pile. She said, I got this one letter I didn't know what to do with. It was from a guy named Kent Smith, who was a local pastor of this little tiny church. And she said, it was obvious he disagreed with me, but he spoke with such kindness and tenderness to me in this letter.

And he invited me to dinner at his house with he and his wife. She goes, I stared at that letter for, it was probably five or six minutes and I couldn't figure out which pile to put it in. She said, well, eventually I'd have put it in the drawer. And she said, I'd pull it out every two or three days.

And I'd look at it and say, which pile does this belong to? She said, so I told one of my friends about it. And they said, well, why don't you go to his house, have dinner with he and his wife, and you can just sort of do some study on them.

Like these crazy Bible believing Christians you can figure out and you can write a paper on them later. She says, I did that. And I started to go to a dinner at a house on Sunday night. She said, I went almost every Sunday night for two years to dinner at his house. She said, I just, in that two years became overwhelmed with his kindness and his tenderness and their generosity toward me. She said, and I'll make a long story really short here. She said, through their love, eventually I came to faith in Christ. She said, I left the lesbian community.

I came to faith in Christ and surrendered to him. She said, I ended up getting fired from Syracuse. Now she's married to a pastor here in Durham named Kent Butterfield.

They are part of a church up in Durham and she's now the mother of four children, two of which are foster adoptions. And so she writes this book called The Gospel Comes with a House Key because she said it was through hospitality that I was brought to faith in Christ. And she makes the case that in this climate that we're in, regardless of who we're dealing with, that our houses are the most important tools that God has given us for the spread of the gospel. She points out, it's the primary way scripture tells us to reach out to people. It's how Jesus primarily reached out to people.

He constantly is eating with people. The gospel, she says, is supposed to come with a house key. When you're sharing the gospel, you give somebody a house key and say, I want you to be a part of my life. Here's what she says in the book. She says, those who live out radically ordinary hospitality, that's what she calls it, see their homes not as theirs at all, but as God's gift to use for the furtherance of his kingdom.

My prayer is that this book, Gospel Comes with a House Key, will help you let God use your home, your apartment, your dorm room, your front yard, your community gymnasium, your garden, or whatever, for the purpose of making strangers into neighbors and neighbors into family. In the book, she gives what she calls a typical overview of a week in the, an overview of a typical week in the Butterfield household. Sunday, she says, that's for worship and fellowship.

That also includes a fellowship meal for our church family at our house that ranges usually from 10 to 30 people on Sunday nights. On Mondays, she said, I usually deliver a meal to a neighbor in need. She told me, I've actually, she actually had me over to her house, me and Veronica, my wife, maybe she thinks I'm a neighbor in need, but he was, it was an awesome meal. And she said, yeah, she says, I'm not on any social media, literally not, except for one thing, the Nextdoor app. She said, I'm the Nextdoor queen, I'm going to tell you.

She says, every single time somebody posts on the Nextdoor app, what they need, she says, I'm the first one there. I get there, whether it's their cat sick, or whether it's they need their dog walked, or they need somebody to water their plants, or they need to go to the hospital. So Mondays, delivering a meal to a neighbor in need. Tuesday, she says, is dinner, informal conversation and prayer at our house with neighbors and church friends. We just do a little prayer for the neighborhood.

Wednesday is a prayer meeting at church. She said, after that, we had to do errands, like dropping off a gift to one of our neighbors who's in jail now. Thursday, she said, we prayer walk in the evening with our neighbors. We have a set time where we just take a prayer walk throughout the neighborhood. We ask neighbors to join us. She said, they're getting the hang of it because now they come out of their houses and they stand on their driveway so that when we walk by, they can give us prayer requests. She said Friday, that's a regular Costco run with an offer to pick up items for neighbors, an optional meal that I'll have that evening and fellowship with neighbors if it works out. Saturday, she said, that's another optional meal and prayer with church members and our neighbors. That's the typical week. Now, I shared this with our church staff, and I told them two things strike me about that schedule. Number one, it sounds kind of exhausting.

To be totally honest with you, that is not my family's schedule right now. But second, most of it, here's what struck me. Most of it are things that any of us can do, right?

You don't have to have a great home or a lot of money to be really gifted at doing this. You just need to believe that God wants you to include strangers and outsiders in your rhythms of life, right? That's what he wants you to do. She thinks that the bulk of gospel ministry, she says, is accomplished just by being a good neighbor. She said, well, we're thinking, what's this key I need for evangelism?

It's just your house. It's being a good neighbor. Throughout the book, she identifies what she calls obstacles that American Christians have to this.

I'll give you a handful of them, and this is kind of my synopsis, not exactly her words. But she says, first one is the wrong definition of hospitality. She said, particularly in Southern culture, we think hospitality means inviting over church friends and cooking a meal for them. Biblically speaking, however, listen, hospitality in the Bible means welcoming in the stranger. The word hospitality in Greek literally means love of the stranger. Welcoming insiders around your table, right, to bring in other church friends, Christian friends, and the Bible is called fellowship. And that's also important, but it's different from hospitality.

Nothing wrong with enjoying fellowship, but the point is, don't limit that guest list of family, friends, relatives, and rich neighbors. Question is, where's the single mom around your table? Where's the orphan? Where's the foster kid?

Where's the prisoner? Where is the abused? This is central to Christian ministry. In fact, one of the requirements for an elder in 1 Timothy 3 is that they are devoted to hospitality, which means their lives are open to people that are outside of the Christian faith.

You see, don't just include those you enjoy or benefit your life or those who can repay you. Here's the second thing. She identifies fear. Many of us, she said, are afraid of what will happen if we open up our homes. What are we going to expose our kids to?

We like to think of our homes as our safe castles, as our territory. She said, yeah, but first of all, that's not how Jesus lived and you want to be his follower, then you got to change that. She said, the real danger is not what some stranger may introduce in your family. The real danger is the sin that'll grow in you and your kids' hearts when they live only sheltered, self-centered lives.

She says, it's not stranger danger that's really dangerous, it's selfishness and isolation from the stranger that really destroys. There was another author I was reading who was talking about how fear kept his family from fostering as an example. He said, because he was like, well, what happens to my kids if I do that?

Eventually, he said, I just sense God telling me to trust him and he would take care of it, so I did it. He said, now having fostered now for many years, he said, there's three benefits from fostering. Number one, you have a real ministry in the life of a child who many times has never really experienced constant steady love. Number two, you end up having a ministry with a lot of the parents who had to give up their kids for fostering because they're, he says, usually they're like a single mom is the highest in that category and we've had real ministry in their lives.

This was the interesting one. Number three, he said, but third, providing care for these children is the single best things we've ever done for our own kids. We've learned how God uses hospitality to shape and form us. That is a fascinating aspect of kingdom living. As you bestow a blessing for the benefit of others, you realize that you too are a recipient of God's grace. He says, the real question is not how dangerous is that stranger.

The real question is how dangerous will I become if I'm not more open? One of our pastors and his wife got involved in inviting refugees into their home. They live in a neighborhood where they are. And they said, yeah, it was scary at first. He said, in fact, the wife told me, she said, she said, all of a sudden I had this guy, this Pakistani neighbor show up at my door. And he says, in very broken English, can I have pressure cooker? And she's like, pressure cooker? He said, yeah, pressure cooker like you make bomb with. And she was like, oh, she says, I don't want to make bomb, I want to make rice, but pressure cooker like one you make bomb with.

And she's like, sure, here's your pressure cooker. She says, we've had to adjust to all kinds of things. She said, but the benefit on my children and my family as we've seen ourselves poured out for the love of Christ is something I would not change. Do you understand this is what it means to follow Jesus? What did you think growing in Christ's likeness meant? What do you think sanctification really is? Do you think he's getting busy in church and memorizing verses, cleaning up yourself morally and stop using swear words, switching your radio to K Love and not watching really bad movies?

Is that what you think Christian growth is? God did not save you to sanitize you and put you on the shelf. He saved you to send you into service.

We could say that he converted you not to quarantine you, he converted you to commission you. And the essence of following Jesus is poured yourself out for others like he poured himself out for you and your meal times, your table is a great way to do that. Here's letter C, viewing hospitality as performance rather than calling.

This is a big one for Southern culture. Here's what Rosaria says, we sometimes forget that the Christian life is a calling, not a performance. Hospitality is necessary whether you have cat hair on the couch or not. People will die of chronic loneliness sooner than they will die of cat hair in the soup. Do not let pride over how clean or how not clean your house is keep you from using it for the kingdom because the issue is not what people think about your housekeeping skills.

The issue is that they are broken and lonely and need a touch from God. The mission is too important to make hospitality primarily about what others think about your housekeeping skills. She explains, she says, most of my hospitality is pretty mundane. I just keep a constant pot of coffee going and soup always on the stove.

She says, I'm not trying to perform them or impress them, I'm just trying to be open to them. I mean, how absurd would it be for you to go to a hospital and need desperate life-saving stuff and to comment on, I'm not going to this hospital because the plants need watering in the lobby. Yeah, they should water their plants, but you know what? If you go to a hospital, it's because you need something life-saving and that's what Jesus says about our homes.

Yeah, take care of your house, clean your house, but most importantly, use it. Don't let your pride over what people think about you keep you from opening up, even in its mess. By the way, other people need to see the mess of your life because when they come into some polished airbrush, perfect structure, they don't relate to that. They're like, well, this is who Jesus loves.

When they see you in your mess and all your dysfunction, that's when you're like, hey, yeah, Jesus loves me this way and he's working on me and he can probably get involved in your mess too. Of course, she says, this is the last one, letter D. She says, this is the big problem, no margin. Practicing radically ordinary hospitality necessitates building margin time into the day, time with regular routines, where it can be disrupted but not destroyed. The margin stays open for the Lord to fill, to take an older neighbor to the doctor, to babysit on the fly, to make room for a family displaced by a flood or a worldwide refugee crisis. Living out radically ordinary hospitality leaves us with plenty to share because we intentionally live below our means. You see, without margin, you're incapable of investing in your neighbors in the spontaneous way that relationships require. Without margin, you just won't have space to meet and serve them and meet their needs.

Margin gives you the ability, we've said, to be interruptible for God's purposes. She says, this is how we'll reach our society today. We live in a post-Christian world. She says that is sick and tired of hearing from Christians.

What they need now is to feel the love of Christians. She said they can still argue with our beliefs. And she's a very committed Christian, believes what this church believes, believes what the Bible says. She says they will argue with our beliefs, but who can argue with us just loving them through genuine mercy-driven hospitality? She says in our day, in our day, for words to be persuasive, our words, listen to this, cannot be stronger than our relationships.

You understand that? Our words cannot be stronger than our relationships. Our words, no matter how beautiful, will not persuade if they're not backed up by this kind of love and hospitality.

My words from up here can be beautiful, and they will not compel people to come to Christ without relationships in your lives with them that will back it up and make it beautiful. Right? It's not rallies. It's not big events. It's not even the stuff we do sometimes when we go to deeper.

Those are all awesome. But in our day, it is these relationships that create that environment that bring people to faith and cry. Social media posts are not bringing people to cry. You understand that? Are we all really clear on that? Your angry Facebook rants on whatever you're angry, it ain't changing nobody's mind about anything. Because in our day, it's not words that change people's minds, it's relationships.

I love this. Stop thinking of witnessing to your neighbors as sneaky, evangelistic raids into their simple lives. She says you got to know them and love them and get up close.

Several of the baptisms we saw last weekend, this was awesome, several of the baptisms and when you heard them tell the story, if you were listening, it was because somebody opened their life up and said, this person just got to know me. So two questions, two questions we've got from this parable. Number one, if your life were depicted as a party, who would the invited guests be? And number two, are you including outsiders at your dinner table?

Right? Here's the last thing I want to challenge you to. I just want to throw this out there. I want to challenge every single one of you to have one person who is outside of the faith that you are praying about how to reach for Christ. What if every person at the Summit Church had one person that they were praying for every day to build a relation to and bring to faith in Christ, you were intentional with them about how you're including them in your life, right? And you are committing to attempting to have them or somebody who's not of the faith in your home at least once a month.

And it's a very practical thing I'd love to challenge you to do. Commit to one time a month, having that person that you're one person or somebody that is not a believer in your home around your table. If we committed to that, can you imagine the change that it would make, not just in our church, but in this community. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer and a challenging conclusion to the teaching series titled Come to the Table.

If you missed any part of this study, you can find every message and its transcript available free of charge at jdgreer.com. So, J.D., our listeners hear from us every day here on Summit Life, but it's not as often that we hear from them, so it's a real treat when we get a letter or email or a phone call. Molly, I know I speak for both of us and everybody here at Summit Life to say that there is nothing we love more, nothing that is as encouraging to us as hearing a firsthand account of how God is using this program, this teaching, this broadcast to change lives for eternity. We've heard from people that God has delivered from sin through this or from struggling with addictions or depression or just the most incredible stories of how God has taken a word that was sown at just the right time and used it to bring eternal life. You are the ones that are enabling us to get this gospel message into the hearts of people and to saturate our country with gospel-centered teaching. So thank you. Thank you for how you have given of yourself to make these messages, these words accessible to others.

We would love to hear from you. You can call us at 866-335-5220 or email us at requests at jdgrier.com. While you're online, check out our newest resource that was just released this week. It's 10 interactive devotionals from the parables of Jesus called Listen Up. We'll send you a copy as a thank you for making a donation to the ministry today.

When you give, you're actually participating in reaching people around the world with gospel-centered Bible teaching. So request your copy today when you donate at the suggested level of $35 or more. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or if it's easier, you can give and request the book online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vitevich. Thank you for spending your week with us.

And we look forward to having you back next week as we kick off a new teaching series titled Instead of Me. We'll see you right here Monday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.